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From Bette’s IG: Bette Midler And Fab Five Freddie And More
By Bette Midler
June 2, 2026
From Bette Midler: A dream come true! Me with #FabFiveFreddy! Get his book, #Everybody’sFly
Who is Fab Five Freddie?
Fab Five Freddy (real name Fred Brathwaite, born August 31, 1959) is an influential American visual artist, filmmaker, rapper, DJ, TV host, and hip-hop pioneer from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
He started as a graffiti artist in the late 1970s, joining the crew “The Fabulous 5” (hence “Fab 5”) and tagging the number 5 subway line prominently. He became one of the first graffiti artists to exhibit paintings internationally, helping bridge street art with the downtown New York art scene alongside figures like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Lee Quinones, and Futura 2000.
Key Contributions to Hip-Hop and Culture
Music and Pop Culture Breakthrough: Blondie name-dropped him in their 1981 hit “Rapture” (“Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody’s fly”), one of the first rap-influenced songs to top the charts. He also rapped and produced tracks like “Change the Beat.”
Film: He co-produced, starred in, and composed music for the seminal 1983 hip-hop film Wild Style. He later acted in films like New Jack City and Juice, directed music videos (e.g., for Nas, Snoop Dogg, Queen Latifah), and made documentaries such as Grass Is Greener.
TV: He hosted MTV’s groundbreaking Yo! MTV Raps, helping bring hip-hop to mainstream audiences as one of the network’s early VJs.
He’s widely seen as a key architect of the street art movement and a bridge between hip-hop, visual art, and mainstream culture in the 1980s. In 2026, he released his memoir Everybody’s Fly: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture.
Today, he remains active as an artist, speaker, and advocate (including for cannabis culture and social justice). He’s recognized as a foundational figure who helped elevate graffiti and hip-hop from the streets to global recognition.
The Book: Everybody’s Fly: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture
“Everybody’s Fly could comfortably sit alongside books by Richard Price, Lucy Sante, Tom Wolfe, or Ed McBain, chronicling New York from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s with both vivid, journalistic descriptions and the outsized flair from a person who was at the center of it all.”
—Rolling Stone
“An exuberant recounting of how a culturally omnivorous kid from Brooklyn willed himself into the wider, shinier world—like Moss Hart’s Act One, but with beatboxing and cans of Krylon spray paint.”
—The New Yorker
An electrifying memoir from the pioneering cultural icon The New Yorker called “the coolest person in New York,” whose fearless creativity reshaped the worlds of art, music, and style
Fab 5 Freddy doesn’t just have a great story—he is the story. Name a seismic cultural shift, and chances are, he wasn’t just there—he was helping to make it happen. He’s among the first graffiti artists to turn subway tags into fine art, the visionary behind the first hip-hop movie, the bridge between Jean-Michel Basquiat and the downtown new wave scene, the first person to take rap global on MTV, and the opening rhyme of Blondie’s number-one smash hit “Rapture”—“Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody’s fly”—the song that propelled hip-hop from the New York streets to mainstream culture. With a spirit of joyful creativity and a deep capacity for connecting with kindred spirits (Basquiat, Haring, Lee, Flash, Warhol, and the Clash, to name a few), he shattered racial and artistic boundaries, bridging worlds and raising underground movements to pop culture dominance.
Everybody’s Fly is a fast-moving, all-access pass to Fred’s extraordinary life—one that begins in a book- and jazz-filled Brooklyn home and takes us deep into New York’s creative explosions from the 1970s into the 1990s. He didn’t just shape culture, he synthesized it—from highbrow to street, the Bronx to the East Village, punk to rap, Warhol to Wild Style. Whether he’s skipping school to wander New York City’s museums, painting subway cars that became moving masterpieces, or bringing hip-hop to downtown clubs for the first time, Fred’s genius has always been in seeing what others couldn’t—until he made them see it too.
Vibrant, rhapsodic, and compulsively readable, Everybody’s Fly is at once an intimate memoir and panoramic cultural history. It is a love letter to the art of seeing, a fascinating account of an inimitable creative life, and a celebration of what it means to shape culture.
